GURPS Harkwood 4e
Social Mechanics There's a couple of problems in using Harkwood's status tables in GURPS4e. One is that 2nd edition mechanics for Status and Wealth don't jibe very well with 4th edition. The other is that they don't make very much sense: what's the legal difference between a landed lord and a baron? What the heck is a non-hereditary noble (aka governor) and what are his children? I'm trying to reconcile some of that wackiness here. Status, Wealth, and Cost of Living GURPS4e assumes that Wealth and Status are tied together. This is actually fairly unsatisfying, as it makes it impossible to describe the difference between a wealthy 18th century solicitor and a wealthy 18th century land owner. By the rules, they're both Wealthy and have Status 2 or so, but certainly Jane Austen would have considered the first to be "in trade" and the social and legal inferior of the latter. This is mostly an issue because high Status increases the Cost of Living, and requires more Wealth to provide the income to cover that. As a solution, define Status solely as social and legal privilege. A high Status figure has more prestige, more precedence, and often more legal rights than a low Status figure. This works perfectly fine in non-egalitarian pseudo-feudal societies, in which the local knight's eyewitness testimony really does matter more than 3 of the local peasants'. Status requires a certain amount of Wealth to support it, but having that Wealth does not necessarily bring higher Status. Instead, Cost of Living is determined by the higher of Wealth or Status. Even the most miserly Filthy Rich peasant has to spend a lot of his monthly income defending that income from everyone else, if for no other reason than to keep the local knight from stealing everything. The advantage to this solution is that we can now have noveau riche merchants who aren't getting richer than the knights with the same nominal income, just because the merchants are Status 0 and have a low cost of living compared to the knights at Status 2. Similarly, we can have wizards that are realistically expensive for the way they're changing society without making them necessarily nobles. Status, Social Regard, and Social Stigma ;Craftsmen :A Master Craftsman is allowed to run his own business and is a freeman. A journeyman is allowed to work in a business while he trains and has other limitations on his life, making him a Second Class Citizen. A Guildmaster has some authority over the craftsmen in that guild. Apprentices live in a Master's household, learning the trade, and have multiple restrictions on what they can do. ;Knights and Nobles :Most knights have at least some land - a manorial village or the like - which mostly supports them, though many have to be directly supported by their lord. They have the right to try low justice (non-capital crimes) in their land. Landed Knights have more land available to them, making them richer, and also make up part of their liege's council, giving them influence on laws and taxes. Knights have a duty to provide fighting men at their liege's request. Knights can enroll freemen as squires, but only landed lords (and above) may confirm squires to knighthood. :Squires, pages, and the like are drawn mostly from the gentry, the children of knights and lords. :Most unlanded lords have a non-hereditary office, appointed at their liege's convenience, and are supported by their liege. They are also members of their liege's council. Their children are considered gentry. Lesser lords have a small amount of land of their own that they may pass to their children. Either type of lord has slightly more precedence than a knight with a similar amount of land. :Landed lords own large amounts of land, parceled out to lesser lords and knights. They do not sit on the King's council. Barons also have large amounts of land, but sit on the King's council. Both are nominally direct vassals of the king. ;Mages :Mages have an advancement scheme similar to craftsman, but are feared by most people. Also, legally, they have slightly more status due to their ability to alter the fabric of reality. ;Saints :Saints have helpful supernatural abilities granted to them by God. Many saints take holy orders but they are not required to do so. Most people defer to saints, giving them some measure of social respectability even though saints lack any kind of formal legal power. Social Climbing A freemen has four methods of advancing on his own merits: # He can join a guild, demonstrate his mastery of the craft, and eventually through politics become Guildmaster. # He can do notable services for his liege, and be appointed as a landless lord in some office. # He can do notable services in the military, becoming a renowned captain of some kind, and be made a knight's squire or perhaps even a knight. # He can take holy orders, and rise through the hierarchy of the Church. A squire can only advance with the permission of a lord, usually only granted when the lord's other knights feel the squire has demonstrated adequate skill at arms. Even then, the lord needs to support him somehow, either by taking him in directly or giving him a fief of some kind. A knight's child only inherits the fief if the child is also a knight; otherwise, the land eschats back to liege lord and some unlanded knight gets an increase in status. Landed lords can only advance to the rank of Baron by the King's appointment and confirmation by the majority of the Royal Council. This obviously involves a lot of politicking, since the King only wants supporters on his council but the members of the council don't necessarily want their vote diluted. Barons also pay higher taxes than mere Lords, so the King wants more of them, but more Barons also means more people arguing on the Council. It's a complicated series of trade-offs. Demographics Mages and Wizards I'm assuming a more magical Caithness than the standard Banestorm model, and I'm also assuming Ritual Path Magic (RPM) instead of icky icky stock GURPS magic. With stock magic, Magery 0 and IQ12 makes for a sad joke of a wizard, someone who has to master the equivalent of mechanical engineering, chemistry, math, and psychology in order to be able to unreliable cast a fireball. With RPM, a guy with Magery 0, IQ 12, and skill-12 in Thaumatology and 3 Paths can make a slow but adequate wizard, especially with access to a few grimoires. Adding Magery makes for a slightly more impressive wizard, but raw intelligence and study matter (ie, Ritual Magery does not buy nearly as much increased power as +2 on all those path skills). So. 1 in 10 people have Ritual Magery 0. 1 in 30 also have a Talent of some kind. ;fixme: need a better model of IQ per population Knights and Nobles About 2% (1 in 50) of the population is gentry/nobility of some kind. Most of these are the dependents of knights, and about 1 in every 500 people is a village knight. Even the smallest villages effectively have a knight in residence, or at least can go fetch a knight from one of the neighboring villages (most likely the one with a biweekly market, but hey). There's one rich landed knight for every 5000 people, usually with a fief consisting of a large market village and most of the surrounding small market and farm villages. Urban Population My version of Harkwood is TL3+1, with magic and better education. So the urban population is much higher than it was pseudo-historically, around 20%. Demographics and Harkwood The town and barony of Harkwood, as described in the adventure, is pretty schizophrenic. The only town has a population of 1500 people (implying ~40,000 in the barony, which is odd since it is supposed to be underpopulated but Caithness as a whole has 3 million people in 17 subrealms, or about 16,000 each). It has 3 inns, but no other taverns (reasonably it should have 4 taverns and no real inn). There are 12 guardsmen, making it absurdly highly policed. The entire barony only has 2 knights - England at the time of the Doomsday book had a manorhouse for every 100 people! It's all very strange. So rationalizing a lot of this: Harkwood (town) is the principal and only town in Harkwood (barony) and is directly the home of 4,500 of the barony's 25,000 residents. Another ~1,500 residents live within a few miles of Harkwood (town), being the fiefs of Sir Darek and Dame Jaenyth. Harkwood (barony) has three other rich landed knights, with large fiefs mostly distance from Harkwood (town), and ~50 or so other knights scattered across the country side, providing stability and defense. Harkwood (town) also hosts another dozen taverns, beer gardens, and pastry shops, mostly in the business district of town but also out by the river and such. There still isn't a Mages Guild, but there is a quality wizard in town as well as Alvin in the Baron's service. ;The Watch and the Guard The Town Watch is a police/defense force with 15 members. Generally, 2 watchman man each gate during the day, 2 more wander throughout the city, and someone mans the guardhouse. At night, the gates close and a pair of guardsmen patrol the business district. There are 3 shifts. Captain Morgris has a ready reserve of himself and three guards during the day, and all the off-shift guards can wake up in case of a real emergency. The Baron's Guard is a larger and more professional military force, tasked with defending Harkwood (castle), the Baron, and his daughter. It is commanded by Lord Dorlyn and supervised by Lieutenant Symond (nominally Captain Morgris' peer, considering the difference in size vs prestige vs independence of their commands). Generally, a few Guards man the gates and stand on the castle walls during the day, and most train or serve as escorts for the baron. The night/off shifts are smaller, and again mostly man the walls. A moderately determined thief can easily slip past the 2-3 guards at night. In a real emergency, like a war, the Baron can theoretically draw on reasonably substantial military forces: 50-60 elite heavy cavalrymen in his knights, another hundred or so cavalrymen and dragoons in their squires and senior retainers, and 200 or so medium and heavy infantrymen from the combined lances and the Guard. The freemen militia brings another 400 to 4000 medium and light infantry, with quality dropping rapidly as the muster is increased. Depending on the nature of the emergency, a fair portion of the knights might be unavailable, and of course summoning the militia disrupts the economy, and there's no much co-ordination between different knights or the soldiers in their lances. For what it's worth, with a standing army of roughly 350, Harkwood has a smaller military than modern day Canada.